The Lost Cause

The Lost Cause is an interpretation of the
American Civil War (1861–1865)
that seeks to present the war, from the perspective of Confederates, in the best
possible terms. Developed by white Southerners, many of them former Confederate
generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and social uncertainty, the Lost Cause created and romanticized
the "Old South" and the Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the
process. For this reason, many historians have labeled the Lost Cause a myth or a
legend. It is certainly an important example of public memory, one in which nostalgia
for the Confederate past is accompanied by a collective forgetting of the horrors of
slavery. Providing a sense of
relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was
largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be
a useful tool in reconciling North and South. The Lost Cause has lost much of its
academic support but continues to be an important part of how the Civil War is
commemorated in the South and remembered in American popular culture. MORE...

Lost Cause proponents have stressed the
primacy of states' rights and
the constitutionality of secession, and have cited the secession crisis—along with
political squabbles such as tariff disputes and broad claims about the evolution
of different societies in the North and South—as the cause of the war instead of
slavery. At the same time, Northern abolitionists have been portrayed as
provocateurs and slavery as justified in part as an institution that eventually
would have died of its own accord. The historian Alan T. Nolan has called this
reading of history "outrageous and disingenuous," suggesting that it was the
dispute over slavery that actually caused the secession crisis. Nolan and other
historians have further noted that many Southern politicians viewed slavery to be,
in the words
of Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, the "foundation" and
"cornerstone" of the Confederacy.

Slavery, meanwhile, is sentimentalized in the context of the Lost Cause. Following
the war, white Southerners told stories of the happy slave, the "Mammy" or "Uncle
Tom" who appeared as part of the family. "Generally speaking, the negroes proved a
harmless and affectionate race, easily governed, and happy in their condition,"
according to the 1908 edition of the textbook History of
Virginia by Mary Tucker
Magill. The 1964 edition of Virginia: History,
Government, Geography by Francis Butler Simkins, Spotswood Hunnicutt
Jones, and Sidman P. Poole was not much different. "A feeling of strong affection
existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes," the authors
wrote. Such statements are not supported by modern scholarship, which suggests
that many slaves were desperate to escape their often harsh conditions both before
and during the war, when they became refugees. In fact, escaped slaves helped to precipitate national
political crises such as the one surrounding the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

The image of African Americans who had been happy under slavery but were
overwhelmed by the responsibilities of freedom became widespread and could be
found in the fiction of Thomas Nelson
Page and Margaret Mitchell, whose novel Gone with the
Wind won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The image also proved particularly
useful to white supremacists. In the 1880s and 1890s, white Southerners, decrying
"Yankee aggression" and black "betrayal," embarked on an effort to reverse the
policies of Reconstruction. They sought to remove black office
holders, disenfranchise African American men, forestall black economic
advancement, and institute state-sanctioned segregation.

Advocates of the Lost Cause further argue
that Confederates were not defeated on the battlefield; rather, they were overwhelmed by massive
Union resources and manpower. Under this presumption, the South was destined to
lose from the beginning, hence "Lost Cause." Robert E. Lee said as much in General
Orders No. 9, his famous farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House
on April 10, 1865, when he insisted that the army had been "compelled to yield to
overwhelming numbers and resources." While this is "a comforting conclusion and it
is not without a substantial basis of fact," according to the historian Bell Irvin
Wiley, it also understates the Union's military accomplishment, which involved
actively subduing a vast and populous country. It also understates the
Confederacy's wartime industrial capacity and its ability to field and supply
large armies. Under the direction of its chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, the Confederacy
was self-sufficient in military hardware by 1863. In addition, the flip side of
this argument, that Union generals were mere butchers, is grossly exaggerated.
Casualty rates at Cold
Harbor were comparable to those during Pickett's Charge.

The Lost Cause further extols the gallantry of Confederate soldiers and insists
that they had not forfeited their honor in losing to a vastly superior foe. The
idealized "Johnny Reb" was heroic, unfaltering, and law-abiding. This, too, came
in part from Lee's General Orders No. 9, in which he lauded the loyalty, valor,
and "unsurpassed courage and fortitude" of "the brave survivors of so many
hard-fought battles." While few dispute that most Confederate soldiers fought
bravely, painting with a broad brush obscures a more complicated historical
reality. Desertion rates were
particularly high among both sides during the Civil War—totaling between 10 and 15
percent of Confederate soldiers—and in June 1862, Confederate general James Longstreet estimated
that of the 32,000 Virginia soldiers under his command, fully 7,000 were absent
without leave. More soldiers were executed for lawlessness—North and
South—than in all other American wars combined.

The Lost Cause characterizes almost all
Confederate military leaders as saintly, but Lee ranks first among heroes.
Appearing almost Christ-like in subsequent Southern iconography, he found
near-instant admiration among many Northern Democratic Party members following the
surrender at Appomattox. Only four days after Lee accepted Ulysses S. Grant's terms, the New York Herald admitted that Lee was "generally well spoken of" in the
North. His status in the South, meanwhile, only increased after his death in 1870,
especially through the efforts of former Confederate general Jubal A. Early and the
publication of the Southern Historical Society Papers.
Early in the twentieth century, Douglas Southall Freeman, his
sympathetic, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, further enhanced this image.

In addition to Lee, Thomas J.
"Stonewall" Jackson was also presented as a saintly and nearly flawless
general immediately after his death following the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863.
Lost Cause authors such as John
Esten Cooke and Robert Lewis Dabney emphasized Jackson's deep religiosity and eccentric
behavior. James Longstreet, however, long remained the exception, dogged by
questions about his performance at the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), and vilified
because of his postwar affiliation with the Republican Party. Revisionist biographies of
Lee, such as Alan Nolan's Lee Considered (1991), and of
Longstreet, such as William Garrett Piston's Lee's Tarnished
Lieutenant (1987), have challenged the idea that either general was a
simple hero or villain.

Finally, according to the Lost Cause,
Confederate women remained loyal and devoted supporters of the war effort. More so
than their Northern counterparts, they willingly sacrificed their husbands,
fathers, sons, and neighbors while simultaneously giving their time and resources
for the cause. This tenet also implies that Confederates remained unified
throughout the conflict. This was largely true, especially among wealthy white
Southern women. In recent years scholars have argued that most working-class and
poor white women did not support the Confederacy or withdrew their support during
the war. On several occasions poor white women did engage in violent displays of
retaliation for their perceived economic injustices—such as the Richmond Bread Riot in
1863—however, according to the historian Jacqueline Glass Campbell these women did
not consider themselves disloyal to the Confederate government. The historian
William Blair has shown, throughout the state of Virginia, "it was possible to be
discouraged by one's government, and mad at the rich, while still pulling for the
Confederacy."

Origins of the Lost Cause

The term "Lost Cause" is not a product of
today's historians; rather, it appears to have been coined by Edward A. Pollard, an
influential wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner. In 1866 Pollard
published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of
the Confederates, a justification of the Confederate war effort, prompting
the popular use of the term.

Even though the phrase "Lost Cause" would not emerge until one year after the war
ended, the reverent mythologizing of the Confederate cause began immediately after
the war. In 1865 and 1866, Confederate women transformed their wartime soldiers'
aid associations into organizations bent on memorializing their Lost Cause.
Claiming to be wives, mothers, and daughters in mourning, Southern white women of the Ladies' Memorial
Associations (LMAs) organized cemeteries for the more than 200,000
Confederate soldiers that remained in unidentified graves on the battlefields and
established the annual tradition of Memorial Days—occasions on which thousands of
ex-Confederates would gather publicly to eulogize their fallen soldiers and
celebrate their failed cause. Relying on the mid-nineteenth-century assumption
that women were naturally non-political, ex-Confederate men recognized that women
might be best suited to take the lead in memorializing the Confederate cause.

In 1867, one of the first Lost Cause
periodicals emerged, a new weekly Richmond newspaper called the Southern Opinion. Established only three months after the federal
Reconstruction Act by the avowed secessionist H. Rives Pollard, brother of Edward A. Pollard
and also a wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, the
paper's expressed purpose was to foster a distinctive Southern culture. Echoing
much of the Ladies' Memorial Associations' sentiment, he repeatedly encouraged
former Confederates to "foster in the hearts of our children the memories of a
century of political and mental triumphs," and preserve the heroism and endurance
of their cause. By 1868, Pollard's paper had become a mouthpiece for continued
Confederate memorial efforts, especially by the Ladies' Memorial Associations.

In the spring of 1869, a handful of former Confederate military leaders issued a
call for a meeting to discuss the establishment of a Confederate historical
society to shape how future generations would understand the war. Dabney H. Maury, Richard
Taylor, Braxton Bragg, and several others formally organized the Southern Historical
Society (SHS) late in April 1869. The men appointed Benjamin Morgan
Palmer president and Dr. Joseph Jones secretary-treasurer and selected other
prominent Confederates as vice presidents of each Southern state. Although the SHS
had a regional scope, Virginia held a powerful base, as a substantial number of
the members hailed from the state—including Maury, Governor John Letcher, General Fitzhugh Lee, General Thomas T.
Munford, Reverend J. William Jones, and General Jubal A. Early. Although the SHS
mailed 6,000 circulars across the South, during 1869 the society gained
little support outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. After several months, fewer than
100 members had joined, and by early in 1870 only 44 members had
contributed dues. Despite the struggle to attain membership, in 1876 it began to
publish the Southern Historical Society Papers in which the
SHS defended nearly every aspect of Confederate action, addressing topics such as
secession, battlefield performance, and the treatment of prisoners of war.

From 1866 until 1872, Early was especially influential in establishing many of the
arguments that have since become Lost Cause dogma. He presented a series of
lectures and articles in the Southern Historical Society
Papers that simultaneously defended his hero Lee from accusations that he
had blundered at Gettysburg and attacked Longstreet, Lee's chief lieutenant for
much of the war. In addition to lionizing Lee and dismissing Longstreet, Early
argued that the war was more important in Virginia than in other theaters.

Following Lee's Death

In 1870 two pivotal events shaped the way
the Lost Cause would evolve in the coming decades. First, after five years of
military occupation, on January 26, 1870, the commonwealth of Virginia was
readmitted to the United States of America and American troops were withdrawn from
the state. Second, and most important, the death of Robert E. Lee on October 12,
1870, ignited an outpouring of Confederate sentiment among many of the state's
elite men. Two competing men's organizations formed to eulogize Lee: the Lee
Memorial Association of Lexington and the Lee Monument Association, initiated by Jubal Early and
based in Richmond. Early likewise started an organization for veterans, the
Association of the Army of Northern Virginia (AANVA).

After a period of depressed interest, the veterans in Virginia and other Southern
states began to organize their own associations. In April 1883, the Lee Camp of
Confederate Veterans established an independent, grassroots association at
Richmond. Other camps soon organized throughout the state, including the Matthew
F. Maury Camp (Fredericksburg, 1883) and the A. P. Hill Camp (Petersburg, ca. 1887). Their goals were to perpetuate the memories of
their fallen comrades and to care for those who were permanently disabled in the
service.

In February 1889, a committee of veterans in New Orleans called for a meeting to
establish a regional Confederate veterans' association. That June, veterans from
Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi met in the Crescent City, where they adopted
a constitution and chose a name, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV).
The Lee Camp joined the UCV the following year; by 1892, 188 camps had joined; by
1896, 850 camps claimed membership.

The United Sons of Confederate Veterans
and the United
Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) formed in similar fashion. (According
to the historian Gaines Foster, "horrified that people might confuse the
abbreviation on their badge, USCV, with United States Colored Volunteers, in 1908
the Sons dropped United from their name.") In 1900, the
Southern Memorial Association of Fayetteville, Arkansas, issued a call for all
LMAs to unite in one body called the Confederated Southern Memorial Association
(CSMA). In keeping with the objectives of LMAs since the 1860s, the association
sought to collect relics and preserve the history of the Confederacy, instill in
the minds of children "a proper veneration for the spirit and glory that animated"
Confederate soldiers, and continue to direct Memorial Day services. The group
would meet each year at an annual meeting that coincided with the United
Confederate Veterans.

By the turn of the century, the Confederate Veteran served
as the mouthpiece of the Lost Cause. Established in 1893 by Sumner Archibald
Cunningham, it proved to be an early contributor to the success of the UCV, and by
1894 was an official organ of that group and its various allies, including the
UDC. Aimed at a mass audience, the monthly magazine featured articles on the war,
monument dedications, textbook campaigns, and obituaries of veterans and devoted
extensive space to the various Confederate organizations. By the end of the 1890s,
circulation peaked at more than 20,000. The magazine remained a staple of the Lost
Cause until it was discontinued in 1932.

Mainstreaming of the Lost Cause

This view of the Civil War and the
extolment of the Lost Cause did not come without protest. Many Unionists, Northern veterans, and
African Americans were bitterly opposed to glorifying the Confederacy and
soft-pedaling slavery. Most famously, the former slave and abolitionist Frederick
Douglass denounced a reconciliation that seemed to exclude those who had been most
wronged. "Rebel graves were decked with loyal flowers," he said, "though no loyal
grave is ever adorned by rebel hands. Loyal men are building homes for rebel
soldiers, but where is the home for Union veterans, builded by rebel hands … ?"
Despite these protests, what seemed to matter most was the public's hunger for a
heroic view of the war, one that would help mend the wounds left by an estimated
620,000 men killed.

Perhaps the most widely consumed and powerful cultural product that succeeded in
satiating this hunger and mending these wounds was D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. Based on Thomas Dixon's best-selling
novels, The Leopard's Spots (1902) and
The Clansman (1905), The Birth of a Nation
reconciled the fractures of Civil War and Reconstruction along racial lines. In
portraying the emancipated
African American as a threat to democracy and white womanhood, The Birth
of a Nation manufactured a healed and united nation by glorifying white supremacy and white
supremacy's greatest champion, the Ku Klux
Klan.

When The Birth of a Nation was first released, it was met
with an immediate and controversial reception. Led by Oswald Garrison Villard, the
editor of the New York Evening Post, and Moorfield Storey,
president of the American Bar Association, the six-year-old National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) planned to stop the film from being shown by
initiating a nationwide boycott. Despite some success—a mass demonstration in
Boston and the temporary banning of the film in a few states and cities—the
sometimes overlapping messages of The Birth of a Nation and
the Lost Cause were absorbed, for the most part unquestioningly, into American
culture.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, and even longer in Virginia, textbooks
presented a picture of the Civil War and race relations that owed much to Gone with the Wind. Only during and after the civil rights
movement of the 1950s and 1960s did some textbooks begin to state that slavery was
the war's most important cause. The Confederate battle flag was adopted as a symbol of "heritage," and, in
a study of Lost Cause art, the historian
Gary W. Gallagher has shown how the battle flag began to proliferate in art
depicting Civil War battles only as it gained status as a retroactive political
and social symbol. It was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that
the national conversation began to catch up to the complications of this symbol,
especially where race is concerned.

In Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished
Civil War (1998), the journalist Tony Horwitz convincingly demonstrated
the various ways in which the Civil War continues to be controversial, both
socially and politically. Still, the Lost Cause's project of reconciliation
largely has been successful. The scholar Stephen Cushman has argued that "a
country in which there are two million copies of Killer
Angels in print"—referring to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel (1974) that
was later turned into the feature film Gettysburg (1993)—"
… is a country that feels stable enough to entertain itself … with a story of a
battle that involved over fifty thousand killed, wounded, and missing people."

The academy, meanwhile, has mostly turned
against the Lost Cause, working to deconstruct its myths and create a more
inclusive history. "The victim of the Lost Cause legend has been history," Alan Nolan has written, "for which the legend has been
substituted in the national memory." African American leaders have also spoken
powerfully about what the absence of that "history" has
meant in their fight against white supremacy. Still, in his 1981 essay collection,
Reflections on the Civil War, the historian Bruce Catton
provocatively suggested that, in the end, "the legend of the lost cause has served
the entire country very well."

The things that were done during the Civil War have not been forgotten, of
course, but we now see them through a veil. We have elevated the entire
conflict to the realm where it is no longer explosive. It is a part of American
legend, a part of American history, a part, if you will, of American romance.
It moves men mightily, to this day, but it does not move them in the direction
of picking up their guns and going at it again. We have had national peace
since the war ended, and we will always have it, and I think the way Lee and
his soldiers conducted themselves in the hours of surrender has a great deal to
do with it.

Worthwhile or not, the Lost
Cause remains an important part of Southern and American culture. Both the Sons of
Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy as well as at
least two Ladies' Memorial Associations in Virginia continued to remain active into the twenty-first century.

Time Line

April 10, 1865
- Confederate general Robert E. Lee's General Orders No. 9, his farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia, praises his troops' "unsurpassed courage and fortitude." He also tells them they had been "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources." Both arguments become fixtures of the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War.

1866
- Ladies' Memorial Associations form throughout Virginia and the former Confederacy to provide "proper" burials and Memorial Day services for the Confederate dead.

1866
- Edward A. Pollard, an editor of the Richmond Examiner during the Civil War, coins the phrase "Lost Cause" when he publishes The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.

1867
- One of the first Lost Cause periodicals, a new weekly Richmond newspaper called Southern Opinion, begins publication. Edited by H. Rives Pollard, its purpose is to foster a distinctive Southern culture.

April 1869
- The Southern Historical Society is formed in New Orleans, Louisiana, with a powerful base of support in Virginia. The society initially finds little support or money. By early in 1870, only forty-four members will contribute dues.

January 26, 1870
- An act of Congress ends Reconstruction in Virginia, readmitting Virginia into the United States and restoring civilian rule.

October 12, 1870
- Robert E. Lee dies of a probable stroke at Lexington.

1876
- The Southern Historical Society begins publication of the Southern Historical Society Papers in which the SHS defends nearly every aspect of Confederate action during the Civil War, addressing topics such as secession, battlefield performance, and the treatment of prisoners of war.

April 1883
- The Lee Camp of Confederate Veterans establishes an independent, grassroots association at Richmond. Other camps organize throughout the state, including the Matthew F. Maury Camp in Fredericksburg (1883) and the A. P. Hill Camp in Petersburg (ca. 1887).

June 1889
- The United Confederate Veterans are formed in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Richmond-based Lee Camp of Confederate Veterans will join the group in 1890.

1893
- The Confederate Veteran, a magazine that serves as a Lost Cause mouthpiece, is established by Sumner Archibald Cunningham. In 1894, it will become the official organ of the United Confederate Veterans until ceasing publication in 1932.

1894
- The United Daughters of the Confederacy forms.

1900
- The Southern Memorial Association of Fayetteville, Arkansas, issues a call for all Ladies' Memorial Associations to unite in one body called the Confederated Southern Memorial Association (CSMA).